The Team

The Okta Privileged Access Management (PAM) team is building the future of identity for machines, services, and applications. We are seeking a world-class Staff Engineer to help us architect and build the high-performance core of our non-human identity platform.

Your work, in close collaboration with our principal engineers and architects, will be the foundation of our strategy for managing privileged access in the modern enterprise. If you are a systems programmer who thrives on influencing the design of high-performance, concurrent, and resilient security software, this is the role for you.

What you'll be doing 

• Contribute to Core Architecture:
  • Partner with principal engineers and architects to design and implement a low-latency, high-throughput secrets engine for non-human identities
• Solve for Massive Scale:
  • Write highly concurrent, performance-critical code capable of handling millions of machine-to-machine authentication and authorization requests
• Shape Technical Strategy:
  • Play a key role in defining the long-term technical roadmap for scalability and performance, ensuring our platform can meet the demands of the largest enterprises
• Mentor and Elevate:
  • As a senior engineer on the team, you will work with junior engineers to help them advance their SDLC expertise.
• On-Call:
  • Participate in the rotational on-call activities with SRE and product development team 

What you'll bring to the role

• Required Experience:
  • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a heavy focus on backend or systems-level development
  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience
• Core Technical Expertise:
  • Deep, hands-on expertise in multi-platform Go development and building high-performance, concurrent applications
  • Experience designing or operating distributed systems
  • Experience with secure systems (authn/authz, encryption, TLS, token handling, PKI, CAs, diagnosing TLS issues)
  • Deep expertise in distributed storage systems, with a focus on replication, backup, and restore, and data management. (Postgres, etc.)
  • Direct experience designing, building, or contributing to a secrets management, service mesh, or machine identity platform
  • Expert-level at ergonomic API design (gRPC/openAPI), and building for reliability at scale
  • Deep knowledge of cloud-native infrastructure
• Key Attributes:
  • You are driven by the challenge of optimizing systems for performance, latency, and throughput, with a proven ability to diagnose complex, multi-system issues
  • You have a proven track record of making significant contributions to the architecture of complex, mission-critical systems
  • You thrive in an environment where you can focus on deep technical problems
• Bonus Points:
  • Experience at a leading Cybersecurity or Infrastructure-as-Code company
  • Contributions to open-source projects in the identity, security, or infrastructure space 

And extra credit if you have experience in any of the following! 

• Deep expertise in backend systems engineering
• Experience building and scaling beyond standard three-tier monolithic architectures, with a focus on modern distributed systems
• Have worked on projects with complex, established systems
• Possess significant, hands-on experience in a Linux/Unix environment

Additional requirements:

• This position requires the ability to access federal environments and/or have access to protected federal data.  As a condition of employment for this position, the successful candidate must be able to submit documentation establishing U.S. Person status (e.g. a U.S. Citizen, National, Lawful Permanent Resident, Refugee, or Asylee. 22 CFR 120.15) upon hire.

This role requires in-person onboarding and travel to our San Francisco office.

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